A Low-Power Hardware Platform for Smart Environment as a Call for More Flexibility and Re-Usability.

This paper presents Chimera, a low-power platform for research and experimentation with reconfigurable hardware for end-devices in the Internet of Things. Through an architecture based on a Flash FPGA, Chimera aims to offer flexibility in the usage via live over-the-air hardware and software reconfiguration. This adaptability enables low-cost insitu deployment of upgrades without the need for physical access to devices as well as the capability to absorb a temporary heavy calculations in response to events. Chimera offers a step forward in pushing computation to the edge, by offering a modular hardware embedded platform that is able to switch instantaneously between largely passive sensor tasks and computing intensive operations while still retaining multi-year battery lifetimes. This paper reviews the factors which have thus far prevented Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) from being used as the primary processors in IoT end-devices and demonstrates through evaluation that the Chimera hardware and software platform work together to overcome these barriers.